Theorem 1: Extremism Loses

Extremist parties do not work in the United
States. Run for office as an extremist and you will lose badly,
making your cause look less popular than if you had not run at
all. This is counterproductive. If you want to push radical
ideas, running for office is the wrong venue.

Nonetheless, the longest running minor parties are very radical.
Radicalism may be a mistake, but it serves the organizations.
Passion is powerful. The more passionate your activists, the harder
they work. Passion correlates strongly to radicalism.
Radical party members tend to be show up for meetings and write
checks for campaigns and office space. Political parties which make
their radical members happy survive, even if they serve no other
useful purpose. This is why we have zombie third parties which run
failed campaigns year after year.

For those of you who want a new political party which serves a
useful purpose grok this: Voters tend to vote for the candidates
with whom they agree. A candidate near the center will have more
voters in agreement than a candidate off in the radical
fringe.

Consider a congressional race in a liberal district. Suppose the
radical liberal elements decide to run a radical socialistic Green
candidate. Meanwhile, the conservative minority gets behind a
barely conservative Republican. And to make it easy for our Green
candidates, let us suppose there is no Democrat in the race
(because the liberal activists got behind the radical Green). If
the voters vote for the candidate closest to their views, the
Republican wins!

Even though the Republican is to the right of the center of this
district, the Green is so far to the left that moderate leftists
end up voting for the Republican. The Green Party thus elects a
Republican in what should be a safe liberal district! This is
rather counterproductive if you are an eco-socialist. (On the other
hand, if you are a devious Republican, you might want to make your
donations to the Green Party instead of the
Republicans…)

We have the converse scenario with a hard-right Constitution
Party candidate vs. a moderately liberal Democrat in a conservative
district. The Constitution Party has the ability to elect a
Democrat in what should be a safe Republican district.

In either case, going with the radical party produces election
results in the opposite direction of the radical
party’s goals! For this reason (and others) most radical
liberals hold their noses to support moderate Democrats and most
radical conservatives hold their noses to support moderate
Republicans.

This leads us to our first rule:

Rule 1: a successful third party must be
moderate enough to win somewhere.

This is actually one of the beauties of the American
political system: it keeps out the wackos. With district based
winner-take-all elections you have to be close enough to the
center to be in the mainstream somewhere. This way we
get legislatures sufficiently united as to be able to conduct
business. With proportional representation commies and fascists
can get elected. Remember Adolf
Hitler. Giving the fringe a seat at the table produces rancor
in the legislatures, Third World style politics. Dictatorship
becomes tempting.

If you want election reform, push for Range Voting, not proportional
representation. Range Voting allows multiple parties to
participate, with each party able to push in a different direction.
However, unlike proportional representation, parties still need
to be close enough to mainstream to work together once they
assemble into legislatures. Change will be gradual enough to
allow people to adapt. (Do note that election reform is not
necessary for implementing a successful new party using this
plan. It would be nice, however.)

That said, we still have quite a bit of room for passion and
principle in our system. Districts vary. A politician who would
be considered a radical leftist by most can still be considered
mainstream in places like Berkeley California. Furthermore, the
model I used in the figures above is approximate.

Even in two-way races, people do not vote purely for
ideological agreement. Some liberals in the liberal scenario
above may well vote for the radical Green candidate in order to
offset the conservatives in other districts. The converse holds for
conservatives in the second scenario for the radical Constitution
Party candidate. Such sophistication is nowhere close to universal,
however. According to my observations in the field voters in the
middle generally go with the candidate closest to their view with
little regard to the impact on the total legislature. Back when
I was active in the Libertarian Party I tried a bathtub metaphor
with moderate libertarians. (If the tub is too cold, you add
unpleasantly hot water in order to bring the overall mixture to the
desired temperature. A radical libertarian is like the hot water.)
It didn’t work.

Also, some votes are won for reasons other than ideology. People
vote for experience, good morals, good looks, pork, special
privileges and/or simple name recognition.

And many people don’t bother to vote. Passion makes
voting worthwhile. It is easier to get out the votes of your
radicals than your swing voters.

For these reasons it is sometimes possible to get away with
being a bit more radical than the ideology diagrams above
would indicate. Combine this with district variance and you
have room for a party with ideas and a platform with teeth.

But there are limits. In my conversations with many Libertarian
activists, I have encountered many who would deny that Rule 1 has
much of any importance. They tell me that platforms don’t
matter, that people don’t read platforms, that it’s
just about money, publicity, name recognition and getting out the
vote.

This is bunk. We have many informed voters. News programs
have traditionally been among the most popular of the major network
offerings. Throw in CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, talk radio and weblogs
and then tell me that only a tiny elite cares about political
platforms. True, many people are ignorant of the issues, and many
of them vote. But even among the ignorant, the platform messages
get through; they rely on the advice of those who are not
ignorant. (See The Tipping Point by Malcolm
Gladwell.)

Whereas a new party need not appeal to 50% of the voters
overall, it does need to appeal to well over 5%. As a rough
first guess, I would suggest that a new party should position
itself at around the 80th percentile along its scale of values;
that is, 20% of the voters should be more radical than the
party’s position. This should provide at least 5-10% of
the voters who are less radical but are still closer to the new
party’s position than they are to the major party positions.
Throw in district variance and you have a majority position
somewhere.

You might get away with being a bit further out, possibly out to
the 90% percentile overall. Doing so can increase passion, which is
useful for acquiring early adopters, but it also loses mainstream
votes.

For comparison, look at the percentile scores of the existing
third parties. Prior to the 2006 reforms, I would say that the
Libertarian Party had positioned itself above the 99th
percentile on the small government scale. That is, less than 1%
of the U.S. population was more radically libertarian than the
Libertarian Party. With the new 2008 platform, the party
might be down as far as the 95th percentile. However, there
are still some pretty radical positions in the platform,
deal-killers for most people. Post 2008, I have not kept up with
the LP platform. I suspect it has been re-radicalized since I left,
but I leave it as an exercise for the reader to verify.

Likewise, I leave it as an exercise for Green and Constitution
Party members and fellow travelers to determine what percentiles
their parties are positioned at.

Rule 1 for third parties is an easy rule to describe, and a hard
rule to stomach for many with the passion sufficient to support a
minor political party. Fortunately, Rule 1 does not rule out a
quest for utopia. It merely rules out utopia in one
political term. With each small success, the next steps become
less radical. Alas, a “Party of Principle” unwilling to
advocate those small never gets to make its long term goals
mainstream.

Now the more bad news: moderation alone is not enough. Rule 1 is
but the first of three rules a third party must abide by to be
successful.

Read the Book

People wanted an ebook version of the Plan here on this site. So I started cleaning
up, reformatting, and adding a huge amount of content. The book is about three
times the length of the free online version -- and easier to read.

CAPITALISM WARNING! Many of the links to Amazon.com are evil affiliate links!
If you click the links and buy the enlightening and delightful products I recommend, I make a small
commission. So click and shop! And buy yourself something expensive like a big screen
television while you are at it. I could
use the dough.